Friday, 20 February 2009

Georg Heym's Fever Hospital

In January 1912 the young German poet Georg Heym met his untimely death whilst ice-skating. At the time he was trying to rescue his friend, Ernst Balcke, who had disappeared through the ice of the frozen River Havel near Berlin when he also fell into the water and was drowned. There follows a Poet-in-Residence translation of Georg Heym's poem Das Fieberspital.

FEVER HOSPITAL

The pale screen on which the many bedsblur is a bare wall in the hospital ward.The patients, thin marionettes, walk in the aisles. One of their number

has all the illnesses. And with white chalkhis suffering is cleanly noted.The fever thunders. Their innardsare burning mountains. Their eyes stare

at the ceiling and two enormous spiderspull long threads from their stomachs.They sit up in their cold linen sheets and their sweats with pulled-up knees.

They bite on the nails of their hands.Their brows glow red lights in grey and furrowed fieldson which death's early sunrise blooms.

They extend their white arms, tremblefrom cold and are dumb with horror.Black from ear to ear their brains whirltheir fast and monstrous spinning waltzes.

The black space yawns behind their backsand from the whitewashed wallsthere reaches out the arm to clench the throatand slowly close its hard and bony hand.

5 comments:

Oh Gwilym - that is the most terrifying poem I think I have ever read. The old fever hospitals in the days before modern drugs, must have been absolutely awful places and that poem really paints an awful picture. It can't even have been very nice doing the translation.

I am in the process of transposing Heyms poems into English and think I have a better "translation"; Here it is:The FeverwardThe faded linen in the many bedsBlends in with walls of sickness, bare and stark.The sicknesses all, the hollow marionettesAre ambling through the halls. A stenciled mark

Upon each of the sick. Their moans and groansAre neatly noted on a board with chalk.The fever thunders. And their guts and bonesAre burning like the mountains. And they gawk

At ceilings where some giant spiders hoverAnd from their innards endless cobwebs tease.They startle, sit upon their chilly coverThe sweat is poring on their pulled up knees.

Their hands are trembling and they bite their nails.The wrinkles on their faces - scarlet red -Are like the fields where over seeded trailsThe crimson veil of dawning death is spread.

They shiver in the frost, and white with fearThey raise their scrawny arms, their tongue is bound.And black inside their heads from ear to earTheir brain is beaten endlessly around.

A fissure in their spine, agape and black,And from the wall that stretches white and blandAppears an arm. And clenched around their neckThe crushing fingers from a bony hand.

Wolfgang, thanks for sending your poem for comparison. I was 'inspired' to translate fever hospital because my dad was a patient in such a hospital (in WWII) until brought home on a hospital ship. He had malaria. He reckoned at least half of the patients died.